Jon Orsi-Beckett, the Bible, and the Furnace

I decided that this year I would try and get ahead on my group project by actually doing something for it before it was about to be presented. So I started reading Frye’s chapter on “the Furnace” and it got me all hot and bothered.

The furnace, for all its fire and burning-is a pretty cool place when you get down to it. It deals with the side of humanity that plagues us all (yes all), all the interest people are down there anyway.  

What got me going though was a visit from an old friend- In a previous class I was exposed to Samuel Beckett. I became enthralled, read whatever material he wrote I could get my hands on, and then decided I couldn’t go on any longer, but I must go on. So I went on, this week, and started re-reading Beckett for a completely different class' project. After speaking with Dr. Sexson and his mention of Beckett as a very biblical influenced writer, I wanted to see how this played out.

Instantly I found a quote, and what a perfect quote for this class, from Samuel Beckett
“Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so naturally I use it”

Frye, in “Words with Power” discusses what he refers to as Demonic and Titanic powers. The Demonic dealing with that which is “evil” but the Titanic, an equal yet almost parallel force, “takes us into the lower depths of the imagery of descent and return…and brings us down to the origins of human wisdom and power.”

With Beckett the discern between demonic and titanic may be unidentifiable, yet throughout his most “demonic” or what we would presume to be “evil” characters there is a “[return] to the origins of human wisdom and power”

(Beckett), in his ceaseless effort to deplete or empty the character, reader, soul, of everything, reduces all existence into its most fundamental forms. Fundamental in the sense as it is                (de)composed of fundament (shit), and then it is the fundamental form of humanity showing through. Granted they show like the exposed rib cage of humanity, with the decomposed flesh rotting away, it is from that decomposition, that compost that fertilizes future beauty.

From his radio play “All that Fall” we get biblical support for this theory, a few lines into the play the character Mrs. Rooney cites the title inspiring passage: “The lord holdeth up all that fall and raisthe up all those that be bowed down” derived from Psalm 145, this may give hope, or shed a the faintest light onto the impenetrable gloom* that occupies much of Beckett’s writing

(to note the gloom is very penetrable--its quite funny)  

In further agreement with Frye’s view of “the furnace” when he says in Words With Power, “…there is no reason for making such a contrast between the daimon of Socrates and a Christian guardian angle, or between what Wordsworth felt when he spoke of “huge and mighty forms” in nature and what a Greek would have thought of Dionysus or Artemis.” Page276.

…as I said in further agreement with that ^

Beckett (or his unnamable narrator), in “The Unnamable”  states “…Malone revolves, a stranger for ever to my infirmities, one who is not as I can never not be. I am motionless in vain, he is the god. And the other? I have assigned him eyes that implore me, offerings for me, need of succor. He does not look at me, does not he know of me, wants for nothing. I alone am man and all the rest divine.” (294  The Three Novels)

As odd as this may seem to express or understand: characters in a novel can serve to be our daimons or guardian angles. What I mean by this must be taken with the understanding of Frye’s earlier comment.
If we are to view these things (daimons or demons, what have you) as our guides up or down the spiritual ladder, literary characters can take the place of these demon figures. The bible clearly is an example of this, because the all the characters and happenings are literary. Their role as spiritual guiders are widely recognized and accepted, but do we not often find ourselves moved spriturally from other texts?  Many may dismiss these secular texts as un-sacred because they do not fit in any religious cannon, but if they move us, connect to us, does that not make them sacred? To us at least?

Anyway, what maybe even harder to express or understand is: That Beckett  works through all his misery and distain for the world, have become for me, sort of spiritual texts, because they have moved me and it has moved me positively. This concept of the dark and disdainful as positive figures may have more formidable roots than my own view, Frye later cites Nietzsche as believing, "that the perpetually dying Dionysus was a life affirming figure"
The Demonic characters such as Malone, may be demonic in “nature” but they are, as Frye describes “Titanic” in their effect. Yes, they have led me down to the depths of humanity, but it came to, as Frye describes, a depth of humanity that became a level of” wisdom and power”.

So I’m happy to be in the furnace, its just getting me warmed up.